Monday, September 23, 2013

Larry Summers and "the unfortunate truth"

I was a bit disappointed when Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration to be the next head of the Federal Reserve. I was hoping that his nomination hearings would re-air the controversy over his statements he made while he was President of Harvard regarding why there aren't more women working in the upper levels of science and math.

"The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is...why is the representation [of women] even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields....It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem."

"He said WHAT?"

Larry Summers lost his job over those remarks. Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, offered a strong defense of Summers, in an article in the New Republic.

Summers's critics have repeatedly mangled his suggestion that innate differences
might be one cause of gender disparities (a suggestion that he drew partly from
a literature review in my book, The Blank Slate) into the claim that they
must be the only cause. And they have converted his suggestion that the
statistical distributions of men's and women's abilities are not identical to
the claim that all men are talented and all women are not--as if someone heard
that women typically live longer than men and concluded that every woman lives
longer than every man. Just as depressing is an apparent unfamiliarity with the
rationale behind political equality, as when Hopkins sarcastically remarked
that, if Summers were right, Harvard should amend its admissions policy,
presumably to accept fewer women. This is a classic confusion between the
factual claim that men and women are not indistinguishable and the moral claim
that we ought to judge people by their individual merits rather than the
statistics of their group.

...

The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo--the
belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think
them--is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is
ingrained into our moral sense. In 2000, he reported asking university students
their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to
buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding
parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the
proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain
them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought
to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them.

Amanda Schaffer offers another view on the topic that is worth considering.